rpbAc8dibigqVSMenbVDN3Hdnka7LwjJDL

rpbAc8dibigqVSMenbVDN3Hdnka7LwjJDL

Thanks!


That's true! I just added some cells right below there to put in your gh/s and the cost of your rig in both USD and BTC.

I should add: I know the graphs are a little numerically crazy. I'm plotting the number of TH/s added in single events, but then plotting them on a continuous line. That doesn't make sense. But if you consider that the data points are all approximately spread out to something like once a month, it's a reasonable, rough way to estimate the trend.

I just put together this spreadsheet this week.... Maybe other people will find it useful. I'd love feedback if folks have other data, corrections, alternate interpretations, etc:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Am5Tfupsz5CfdGppUUVxLWttVzZzSHpxYzNPWjVDYUE#gid=5

I tried to use whatever data I could find and then just make guesses to project forward. I tried to make be as conservative as possible, where conservative means the hashrate is going way up, because I'm trying to estimate whether I'll recoup my investment in a BFL single.

Doesn't look that good for me, but I still have hope. Worst case scenario I'll help decentralize the network a touch.

Edit: Sorry, pasted the wrong url at first!

Colored coins are fascinating from a Metcalfe's Law perspective. People say that competing cryptocurrencies will have a hard time competing with Bitcoin because of network effects... The more people in the Bitcoin network, the more valuable it is, and the crappier new startup cryptocurrencies look in comparison.

But because they are build on top of the Bitcoin infrastructure, new CC currencies actually stand to benefit from some of the Bitcoin network effects. They can use existing Bitcoin open source software, they benefit from growing hash rate, etc.

They can't take advantage of every Bitcoin network effect... For example, you may not be able to trade them on exchanges unless the exchange supports colored coins. But they are not totally isolated the way that, say, Google Plus is isolated from Facebook.

What that means is Bitcoin could grow very strong, and a new CC currency could emerge and be able to compete directly with "vanilla" Bitcoin for large segments of the Bitcoin market. When we talk about the possibility that the Bitcoin economy grows to a $100B or $1T or $10T market cap, that value could be split up unevenly between various colored coins. If the "Bitcoin" economy is worth $10T, but $9T of that value is colored coins which are denominated out of 1000 BTC, then the effective market cap for your "vanilla" Bitcoins is only $1T, and the price of your vanilla bitcoins will be a fraction of that lower cap.

Until recently, I saw my Bitcoins as a fixed share of the Bitcoin economy. But I realize now colored coins are a way to dilute that share.

Which isn't to say they are a bad thing. I think colored coins will "grow the pie" as they take a slice. Since colored coins rising in value contribute to the network effects of Bitcoin, they strengthen everyone's position. And because they allow new currency mechanics, they will allow Bitcoin to compete more effectively with new cryptocurrencies.  Fewer alternate blockchains is good for Bitcoin, I think.

I guess law is already sort of protocolized, in that they only stand as along as the community enforces them according to the rules. But I'm talking about things that can be turned into cryptographically-enforced protocols. Can law enforcement and government really exist cryptographically?

What the site is proposing to do could be a legitimate service.

But what is actually there right now is the opportunity to click into a bunch of scammy ads. I tried taking the offer to download some software, and it just sucked me to a page that Chrome thought was phishing, and actually just led to a broken link.

Not recommended.

Bitcoin, at it's core, is not about money. It is about designing cryptographic contracts that allow you to trust a crowd of random strangers to do things on your behalf in exchange for a small slice of the value moving through your transactions.

And it is not the first such protocol. It extends from a growing tradition of similar services. Bittorrent allows you to trust a random crowd to distribute files on your behalf. Tor allows you to trust a random crowd to route traffic on your behalf.

The benefits of these protocols over their predecessors (VISA, Napster, and TCP/IP) is that they allow you to create contracts that don't rely on State-Sponsored violence, and all the compromises they entail, for enforcement. In fact, they don't rely on any single individual or organization for enforcement whatsoever.

This accomplishes two major goals: democratization and freedom. Democratization as in bittorrent allowing a single uploader of a video file to have the same reach as CNN. And freedom as in Bitcoin preventing accounts from being frozen, and traffic within the Tor network being unblockable.

Indeed, these services are not institutions, but merely protocols.  Well, at it's inception Bitcoin was a protocol, with some proof-of-concept software, and a paper. But once news of the protocol spread to a handful of enthusiasts, the protocol, the blockchain, and the software were out of Satoshi's hands. Today, Bitcoin is simply a powerful idea, reified in the participation of those it behooves to participate.

So the question then arises: How far will this protocolization go? What other services can be protocolized?

I just looked in my wallet and realized that the 0.05 I got from the Bitcoin Faucet back in the day is now worth a couple bucks. Not too shabby. Maybe I should go buy a beer. On tap. On the tap's tab?

Hi everyone!

I don't want to say too much, but will say I thought a bunch about the signature on this post. I generated an address for donation at bitaddress.org, and copied it carefully onto a piece of paper (what if someone hacks into my printer? don't printers store old documents sometimes?).

But then I realized that I would want to have it backed up in at least two places. What if my house burns down? I'd have to store it digitally too.  So I tried to see if I could copy it into my local Bitcoin-qt wallet. Unencrypted it, fired up bitcoin, but couldn't figure out how to paste in a private key. Can't seem to find the import button.

So I just generated a new address in there and am using that, and it's backed up in "the cloud" so that seems safe enough.

Once I had an address, I thought for a bit about whether to put instructions in the signature. I decided that it sort of speaks for itself.